In the short term, you will risk gaining weight and feeling unfocused. A high sugar intake also affects your glucose metabolism and causes high blood glucose. This then also affects your sleep and weight.

In the long term, consuming an excessive amount of added sugar can lead to type-2 diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease, certain cancers, and cardiovascular diseases, and even potentially addictive.

Added sugar raises your blood pressure and leads to increased risk of chronic inflammation, both of which are paths to attaining heart diseases. 

A 15-year study showed that people who consume 17-21% of their total calories intake from added sugar had a 38% higher risk of dying from a heart disease in comparison to those who intake 8% of their calories from added sugar. 

Another frightening fact is that studies have shown that a long-term sugar diet can diminish your brain’s ability to take in new information and memorize it.

Added sugar is super hard to avoid. It may appear even in your healthy food choices. Beware of it next time you dine out or go to the supermarket. Check the food label, and you will notice some kind of sugar in soups, salad dressings, cured meats, whole grain bread, dark chocolate and in the “healthy” kombuchas where sugar was added after the fermentation to improve the taste. 

The further up an ingredient is listed in the ingredients list, the more of it is in the product. Ingredients used in the greatest amounts are listed first. 

In Europe, it might be hard to identify the amount of added sugar on the nutrition label. This is because manufacturers are only obliged to declare the total sugar amount, “of which sugar”, under the carbohydrate (grams of sugar per 100 grams of the product) index. This means that the naturally occurring and added sugars are mixed together making it difficult to spot added sugars.

Under the European Union regulation, sugar-free claims may only be used when:

First things first: the term blood sugar and glucose levels are synonyms.  Here is why: 

when you eat food containing carbohydrates, your body breaks them down into a type of sugar, called glucose. Glucose and fatty acids are your body’s main sources of energy, and after a meal, the fat is stored and the glucose is released into the blood – hence the words blood sugar or blood glucose. Your body senses that glucose has entered your bloodstream and it triggers your endocrine system (your pancreas) to release insulin that regulates the glucose by prompting your cells to absorb it for energy utilization and storage. 

Low blood glucose levels (hypoglycemia) can occur when you don’t eat enough carbs, drink alcohol, are ill, or take certain medications.

High blood glucose levels (hyperglycemia), can happen when you ingest a large number of carbohydrate rich-foods, through lack of sleep, due to insulin insensitivity, but also due to stress, trauma, or a chronic condition. It can also affect how your body responds to exercise. Studies show that people with high glucose levels can’t reap the full health benefits of training.

Recognizing the signs of high and low glucose levels is crucial to lead a healthy life.

Both low and high glucose levels are difficult to spot and can go easily unnoticed, therefore the conditions often go untreated. A Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) device can help you see, in real-time, how your diet, sleep, exercise and stress levels affect your blood glucose. Managing and controlling your glucose levels is a great way to stay healthy and prevent metabolic disorders .

By now, it is a well-known fact that when it comes to your health, one of the best things you can do is exercise. So it should be no surprise that exercise effectively helps keep your glucose level steady. The muscles in your body need glucose as fuel, and when exercising your glucose demand increases because our muscles get activated. Exercise also increases our body’s insulin sensitivity, encouraging insulin to work more effectively to reduce blood glucose spikes faster.

It’s important to know that different kinds of exercises affect your glucose levels differently. How they change during an exercise can depend on the following:

It’s a myth that as we grow older, we need less sleep. We, in fact, need as much sleep in our 60s as we do in our 20s because recovery is essential whether you are young or old. To quote the sleep expert, Professor Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkley, “sleep is probably the single most effective thing you can do to reset your body and health.” 

Let’s examine exactly why that is.

Sleep contributes to our emotional well-being as it functions as a therapy to help us fight off feelings of depression and anxiety. Furthermore, it enhances cognitive performance, boosts our immune system, increases longevity, has an anti-aging effect – and even makes us look more attractive! 

That’s not all: We even get smarter when waking up from a good night’s sleep. You probably heard somebody say, “Tomorrow will look different. Sleep on the problem,” well it might be one of the best pieces of advice you can get. Sleep enhances our memories and creativity as our brain processes new information, ties it with stored memories, and identifies new patterns – helping us find solutions we couldn’t make out before.

To further emphasize the importance of sleep, let’s talk about what can happen if you are underslept.

It can play out as emotional instability the next day. We might become irrational, impulsive or suddenly need to seek out sensations and rewards. This is because the prefrontal cortex – the logical part of our brain – takes the hit and can no longer properly regulate the part of the brain that stabilizes emotions – the amygdala.

There are also potential chronic effects since sleep functions as a “save button” for our brain when memorizing new information. Lack of sleep actually reduces our brain’s ability to lay down new memory traces by 40%. Studies show that sleep deprivation is the most significant lifestyle factor determining if you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. 

Another chain reaction deriving from lack of sleep is the one affecting our hormones. Sleep deprivation is linked to hormonal changes affecting our body’s glucose (blood sugar) regulation. Normally, when our bodies sense a spike in glucose, they start to release insulin to regulate it. If we are under-slept, our bodies (our pancreases) may become insulin insensitive and not release the adequate amount of insulin needed to regulate the glucose spikes. This, of course, affects our glucose tolerance, which may lead to an increased risk for diabetes. In fact, people who sleep 5 hours or less per night have a significantly higher risk of being diagnosed with diabetes compared to those who sleep 8 hours. 

If you plan to start on that healthy diet, make sure to plan for good sleep too! Studies show that sleep deprivation affects the hormones that regulate our hunger. Lack of sleep causes an increase in certain hormones that stimulate hunger and a decrease in other hormones that let us know when we are full. This means that if you are sleep deprived, you will most likely crave and eat more food than you actually need, especially food rich in fats and carbs. This, in turn, is an entry ticket for a glucose roller coaster. 

It definitely does, but remember that quantity and quality are equally important here.

The recommended hours of sleep are between 7-9 hours, with 8 hours being the ideal for most people.

But how do I know if 8 hours of sleep is enough for me? Well, let’s say your alarm didn’t go off one morning. Would you continue to sleep? If yes, you are not getting enough sleep. 

Before we take steps to improve our sleep quality, it helps to understand the four stages of sleep: there are three NREM (non-rapid-eye movement) stages and one REM (rapid-eye movement) stage.

Stage 1. The “dozing off” stage occurs right before you fall asleep.

Stage 2. During this stage, your heart rate, brain activity, and body temperature are lower. 

Stage 3. Here is where we enter deep sleep or slow-wave sleep (SWS). This stage is considered critical for restorative sleep and essential for your body’s glucose management. 

Stage 4. In the crucial REM stage, brain activity picks up rapidly. It is restorative to cognitive functions such as creativity, learning and memory.

The stages move in a cycling pattern and have varying lengths. The length of each stage can be influenced, and this is how our lifestyle choices come into play.

Pulling all-nighters, having an irregular sleep schedule or regularly having your sleep disturbed are all factors that can negatively affect the sleep stages and in turn, affect your physical and mental recovery.

Therefore, sleep quality means optimizing the different sleeping stages, especially deep sleep (SWS) and REM.